Many times it is convenient to create a special administrator account that can be used for the task scheduler.
Unfortunately, if your Windows 7 computer is not joined to a domain, any accounts you create are shown at the start-up screen:
It would look better if you could remove this special account from the welcome screen, and only show real user accounts.
How can you remove this from the welcome screen?
Well, it happens that there is a registry key that will allow you to do this. Before I start to tell you what it is – I want to give you a word of warning:
Hide the wrong account, and you could lock yourself out forever. If you hose your system, don’t come crying to me
Ok, now that we got that out of the way, open regedit and drill down to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\
Under this key, you will need to create two sub keys. First create a key named “SpecialAccounts”, and under that key create another named “UserList”.
The final registry path will look like this:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList
It is possible those keys already exist, and if they do then, hey, you get to skip a step
Next you need to create a new DWORD value under that key.
The value name is the exact username that you want to hide.
The numerical value is a 0 or a 1. If you set it to 0, then the account will be hidden. Set it to 1, and it will be shown.
You can see here that I have created a value for my SchedAccount:
After closing regedit, and switching back to the welcome screen we can see that the SchedAccount is no longer displayed:
This is a simple and fast way to hide an account, but at the same time please be very careful.
To drive home the point – look at the UAC prompt when I disabled all accounts, except a limited user account:
That YES button looks really clickable doesnt it? Yea right, now were stuck. No way of ever getting admin rights on the system again. Once you are in this state, you will need to restore from backup. So check twice before making those registry changes.
Hey Steve. I know you gave us fair warning, but about 6 months ago I was messing with this reg key on my Vista system. I made the exact mistake you showed at the end of the article. I have been limping along with it for all this time, and dread doing a format/reload
Any way to get my system back without reloading the OS?
you might try using a registry editor tool outside the windows instance. there are a few ways to gain access to this – contact me directly if you need an idea.
You could try Bart’s PE to create a bootable windows DVD and then you could open the registry from there. The website for that is http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder
Not sure if Bart’s will let you see Windows 7 registry dat files tho…another avenue would be to create a Windows 7 PE from the install disk. and then run regedit from there. That is a little complicated…and maybe I should write an article about it
[...] Hide user accounts in Windows 7 By going into the registry editor you can hide user accounts from the Windows login screen. (tags: windows registry hide useraccounts) Posted in Bookmarks | Leave a Comment [...]
The solution to hiding all admin accounts from the welcome screen is to first go in to the local group policy editor (gpedit.msc) and go to Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Credential User Interface and change “Enumerate adminstrator accounts on elevation” to “Disabled.” This causes UAC to prompt for a Username and Password rather than list all the adminstrator accounts. This way you can type in the name of the hidden account and use UAC.
Very interesting. I was not aware of that. I wonder…does this mean that account will not show up on the welcome screen also?
Having EnumerateAdmininistrators set to disabled only stops the “run as administrator dialog” from populating. If you only have Win 7 Home edition, you don’t have access to the local group policy manager. You can still set the option in the registry, by setting the key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\CredUI\EnumerateAdministrators to 0(Dword)
What this does is allow you to hide an admin account, like you showed in your post, while still allowing it to be used for “run as administrator”.
Excellent. I will have to try this out.
[...] Ausführlichere Beschreibung mit Problem: http://www.intelliadmin.com/index.php/2009/10/hide-user-accounts-in-windows-7/ [...]
But how do you access the hidden account when you need to use it?
Unfortunately if you want to use it to actually login…this is not possible. Hidden accounts are great to use for scheduled tasks or services.
In the past you could press CTRL-ALT-DEL twice really fast in Windows XP, and it would allow you to get to a login screen where you could type in a username and password…then you could type in your hidden account name. Now that feature is gone.